SOUTHERN LIGHTS: How to have grammatically correct grits

By Ben Windham

Published: Sunday, October 20, 2013 at 3:30 a.m.

Last Modified: Saturday, October 19, 2013 at 8:56 p.m.

Joel Jones, a kinsman who died before I was born, was a surveyor in Marengo County. In the course of his profession — working over open, rural fields, crossing creeks, sometimes fording rivers — he amassed quite a collection of relics.

Jones had a keen sense of history. Born in January of 1861, he was the son of a Confederate soldier who died in the Civil War. His mother, a teacher, came from my own mother’s large family clan in southwest Alabama.

As befits a surveyor, Jones also was well-organized. A longtime columnist for the Linden Democrat-Reporter, he penned his own obituary years before his death (“I was born January 5, 1861, at what was at that time Sweet Water, but later became the village of Exmore, in Marengo County, Alabama, and died (To be supplied by the editor.)”

To which the editor duly appended “(Friday, June 28, 1946, at Dixons Mills, Alabama.)”

In the self-penned obituary, he recounts his rise from a child curious about plotting land, to transit man, to chief surveyor.

What he doesn’t tell is how he amassed his collection of relics. Though oral family history has him pocketing arrowheads during his surveys (including one for a never-constructed rail line from Tuscaloosa to some place named Deep Water, Ala.), it doesn’t explain the Civil War-era cannonball from Cold Harbor, Va., or the large, beautifully flaked lance point, quite unlike any I’ve ever seen, that eventually were passed on to me.

Part of Jones’ collection was an impressive Indian grindstone.

They are harder to find than arrowheads but they aren’t very rare. I’ve found quite a few Indian grindstones myself. Invariably, they were on the margins of plowed fields, immediately adjacent to woodlands. You had to turn them over to see the concave impression.

An older friend who often took me arrowhead hunting told me that the Indians turned the grindstones face-down when they finished their work so no one would steal them. The stones were left at the edges of fields when tribes moved away or when their owners were killed, he told me.

“You are the first person to see the business end of that grindstone in hundreds of years,” he’d say.

Rationally, I thought that was a load of rubbish. It seemed more likely that farmers would toss aside the big rocks hindering their plowing. Yet emotionally, with all the romance of collecting history, I liked to believe it.

Joel Jones thought so much of his grindstone that he had it mounted alongside his best arrowheads. I have an old photograph of him at his small surveyor’s office, proudly displaying his relics fixed with small pieces of wire on an advertising sign.

The grindstone was well worth displaying, however. It is wonderfully formed and there is a deep impression, perfectly smooth from decades of use, on its face. What makes it unique, however, is that there is another concave impression on its other side.

There is no way to hide this tool, to pretend it’s just a rock at the edge of a field. I’ve never seen or heard of a two-sided grindstone.

I’ve often wondered why there are two sides. Was one used for nuts and the other for maize? Both were ground for meal — acorns mostly for soup and maize for a lot of things.

Supposedly, the word grits derives from the Old English grytt, a word meaning coarse meal.

Whites eventually replaced the Indian grindstones by big, man-made wheels but tradition dies hard, especially in this part of the country. Old-time Southerners would tell you that cornmeal wasn’t really worthwhile unless it had a little bit of rocky grit in it.

Maize (later, corn) wasn’t known in Europe until after the discovery of the Americas. In medieval times, people made meal from wheat and other grains.

According to at least one historian, the South’s association with grits began in 1607, when Jamestown colonists ate the Indian specialty. Today, grits has gone nationwide. Yet 75 percent of the grits manufactured in the U.S. is sold in the South.

“This is the South,” wrote The New York Times’ Turner Catledge, “and grits, regarded as a universal staple, is served whether you order it or not, especially at breakfast.”

Indeed, grits is a regional symbol. Remember when Georgia’s Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale campaigned and the press referred to them as “Grits and Fritz”? In 2002, the Georgia Legislature designated grits as the state’s official prepared food.

I don’t know what that means, either, but I do know that it’s hard to get grits above the Mason-Dixon line. Meanwhile, the great arc from Virginia to Texas sometimes is referred to as “the grits belt.”

Grits knows no social boundaries. The Waffle House has them and so do some of the fanciest restaurants in this region. You can serve them with quail or squirrels’ brains.

Cheese grits is a popular dish. Grits is a natural with eggs and/or red-eye gravy.

You can cook grits all sorts of ways — thin or thick, wet or dryish. Catledge, the late executive editor of The Times, wrote about a fancy gathering in New York where they served it with caviar and used grits to stuff mushrooms.

The hard-core Southerners didn’t like that stuff, however, he wrote. They liked their grits with fried chicken.

Since it’s primarily a Southern food, you can even fry grits.

An aside: I think anything fries down here. I’m not so big on fried ice cream, but they make a dish in New Orleans of a deep-fried roast beef sandwich, topped with “debris” — little pieces of bread and meat left over from the frying. It has enough cholesterol to kill an elephant.

I like grits plain and simple. Maybe mix in a pat of butter and a little salt and they’re good to go.

Now anybody with any sense knows that grits is singular, except when it’s not. Still, there are people, mostly from Northern climes, who insist that it’s plural. Many dictionaries split the difference, saying grits can be singular or plural.

Some Southerners get wrought up about it, however. A few years back, one of them even put the question to longtime journalist James J. Kilpatrick, who syndicated a wonderful column on language.

“I had clean forgotten the controversy over whether grits is singular or plural,” he replied. “If I ever feel the need to stir up some mail, I’ll raise a deadpan question — is grits is or are grits are?